Section: 2E1 - Holy Objects.
Number of quotes: 176
1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West
Roger Crowley
Book ID: 2 Page: 218/219
Section: 2E1
For a short while, indiscriminate slaughter continued to rage: “the whole city was filled with men killing or being killed, fleeing or pursuing,” according to Chalcocondylas,”…
Many who reached home before the intruders, realizing the likely outcome of surrender, decided to die in defense of their families. People hid themselves away in cellars and cisterns or wandered about the city in dazed confusion waiting to be captured or killed. A pathetic scene took place at the church of Theodosia down near the Golden horn. It was a saint’s feast day.
…
In the early morning, a procession of men and women were wending their way toward the church, blindly trusting in the miraculous power of prayer. They were carrying the customary gifts, “beautifully embellished and adorned candles and incense,” when they were intercepted by soldiers and carried off; the whole congregation was taken prisoner; the church, which was rich with the offerings of worshipers, was stripped. Theodosia’s bones were thrown to the dogs.
Quote ID: 10
Time Periods: 7
A Chronicle of the Last Pagans
Pierre Chuvin
Book ID: 4 Page: 29
Section: 3C,2E1
The same intention of exploiting for his own purposes the magical power of ancient statues can be seen in Constantine’s decision to use for the representation of the emperor on the top of his porphyry column a statue of Apollo from Ilium (Troy), whose head was recarved for the occasion. Apollo had been the great defender of Troy (whose heir, via Aeneas, Rome considered itself); and as the Sun God, he protected Constantine.2E1
Similarly, the palladion was transferred from Rome to Constantinople. This relic, said to have been brought to Italy from Troy by Aeneas, was a very old statue of Athena, which made impregnable any city that possessed it.{15}
Quote ID: 34
Time Periods: 04
A History of Ecclesiastical Dress
Janet Mayo
Book ID: 6 Page: 11
Section: 1A,2E1
During the time of the persecution of Christians by Nero, distinctive clothes would have been positively dangerous. The persecution of the Christians began just as it was becoming clear that the Church would outlast the lives of the men who had known Jesus Christ in his lifetime, and the early Church had to blend into the Roman community to survive.
Quote ID: 103
Time Periods: 14
A History of Ecclesiastical Dress
Janet Mayo
Book ID: 6 Page: 11
Section: 2E1
A consideration of ecclesiastical vestments will reveal that they had their origins in secular Roman dress. The view that vestments were of Levitical origin and came from Jewish priestly garments is a later idea.
Quote ID: 104
Time Periods: 4567
A History of Ecclesiastical Dress
Janet Mayo
Book ID: 6 Page: 12
Section: 2E1
Clement, Bishop of Rome 90-100, represents St. Peter as saying ‘My dress is what you see, a tunic with a pallium.’ {3} This form of dress would have been worn in Judaea, as elsewhere throughout the Empire, by the middle and upper classes. The labouring classes and the poor had different styles of costume according to region, type of work and income, but these have little bearing on the early development of ecclesiastical dress.
Quote ID: 105
Time Periods: 1
Ante-Pacem Archaeological Evidence of Church Life Before Constantine
Graydon F. Snyder
Book ID: 25 Page: 60
Section: 2A1,2E1
Like the Orante and criophorus, the sign of the cross has been a symbol of great antiquity, present in nearly every known culture. Its meaning has eluded anthropologists, though its use in funerary art could well point to a defense against evil. On the other hand, the famous crux ansata of Egypt, depicted coming from the mouth, must refer to life or breath. The universal use of the sign of the cross makes more poignant the striking lack of crosses in early Christian art scenes, especially any specific reference to the event on Golgotha. Why was the universal cross symbol not redefined in early Christian art? The cross symbol, as an artistic reference to the passion event, cannot be found prior to the time of Constantine.
Quote ID: 450
Time Periods: 01234
Arab Historians of the Crusades
Fancesco Gabrieli
Book ID: 27 Page: 136
Section: 2E1
THE CAPTURE OF THE GREAT CROSS ON THE DAY OF BATTLEAt the same time as the King was taken the ‘True Cross’ was also captured, and the idolators who were trying to defend it were routed. It was this cross, brought into position and raised on high, to which all Christians prostrated themselves and bowed their heads. Indeed, they maintain that it is made of the wood of the cross on which, they say, he whom they adore was hung, and so they venerate it and prostrate themselves before it. They had housed it in a casing of gold, adorned with pearls and gems, and kept it ready for the festival of the Passion, for the observance of their yearly ceremony. When the priests exposed it to view the heads (of the bearers) bore it along all would run and cast themselves down around it, and no one was allowed to lag behind or hang back without forfeiting his liberty. Its capture was for them more important than the loss of the King and was the gravest blow that they sustained in that battle. The cross was a prize without equal, for it was the supreme object of their faith. To venerate it was their prescribed duty, for it was their God, before whom they would bow their foreheads to the ground, and to which their mouths sang hymns. They fainted at its appearance, they raised their eyes to contemplate it, they were consumed with passion when it was exhibited and boasted of nothing else when they had seen it. They went into ecstasies at its reappearance, they offered up their lives for it and sought comfort from it, so much so that they had copies made of it which they worshipped, before which they prostrated themselves in their houses and on which they called when they gave evidence. So when the Great Cross was taken great was the calamity that befell them, and the strength drained from their loins. Great was the number of the defeated, exalted the feelings of the victorious army. It seemed as if, once they knew of the capture of the Cross, none of them would survive that day of ill-omen. They perished in death or imprisonment, and were overcome by force and violence. The Sultan encamped on the plain of Tiberias like a lion in the desert or the moon in its full splendor.e calamity that befell them, and the strength drained from their loins. Great was the number of the defeated, exalted the feelings of the victorious army. It seemed as if, once they knew of the capture of the Cross, none of them would survive that day of ill-omen. They perished in death or imprisonment, and were overcome by force and violence. The Sultan encamped on the plain of Tiberias like a lion in the desert or the moon in its full splendor.
Quote ID: 503
Time Periods: 7
Arnobius, ANF Vol. 6, Fathers of the Third Century
Edited by Alexander Roberts
Book ID: 659 Page: 508
Section: 2E1
Book VI
4. But, says my opponent, it is not for this reason that we assign temples to the gods as though we wished to ward off from them drenching storms of rain, winds, showers, or the rays of the sun; but in order that we may be able to see them in person and close at hand, to come near and address them, and impart to them, when in a measure present, the expressions of our reverent feelings. For if they are invoked under the open heaven, and the canopy of ether, they hear nothing, I suppose; and unless prayers are addressed to them near at hand, they will stand deaf and immoveable as if nothing were said.
PJ footnote reference: Arnobius, Against the Heathen, VI.4.
Quote ID: 9477
Time Periods: 34
Arnobius, ANF Vol. 6, Fathers of the Third Century
Edited by Alexander Roberts
Book ID: 659 Page: 516
Section: 2E1
Here also the advocates of images are wont to say this also, that the ancients knew well that images have no divine nature, and that there is no sense in them, but that they formed them profitably and wisely, for the sake of the unmanageable and ignorant mob, which is the majority in nations and in states, in order that a kinds of appearance, as it were, of deities being presented to them, from fear they might shake off their rude natures, and, supposing that they were acting in the presence of the gods, put {17} away their impious deeds, and changing their manners, learn to act as men; {18}
PJ footnote reference: Arnobius, Against the Heathen, VI.24.
Quote ID: 9480
Time Periods: 34
Augustus to Constantine
Robert M. Grant
Book ID: 34 Page: 310
Section: 2E1
Helena had made inquiries of the natives and was directed to a location where “ancient persecutors” had erected a shrine of Aphrodite. Encouraged by visions, she had the area excavated and found three crosses “in a confused order,” along with the superscription made for Pilate in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew (John 19:20). In order to determine which one was the true cross, the bishop of Jerusalem proposed to take a grievously sick woman and place her on each one. After his prayer for divine guidance she was placed on the first two, with no result; the third, evidently the authentic “saving wood”, restored her health. The queen mother built a church on the spot and kept part of the cross there in sliver reliquaries. She sent the nails from the cross, and part of the cross itself, to her son Constantine.
Quote ID: 667
Time Periods: 4
Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World
Peter Brown
Book ID: 35 Page: 72
Section: 2E1
A massive public catastrophe, such as the onslaught of the plague, swamped the ministrations of the holy man. It was reassuring to believe that the cloth from the tomb of Saint Remigius, carried in a litter around Rheims, had created a sacred circuit that kept the bubonic plague away from the city.37 But Rheims was fortunate.
Quote ID: 722
Time Periods: 7
Basilica
R.A. Scotti
Book ID: 39 Page: 37
Section: 2E1
The cross became the symbol of the empire’s new, official faith.
Quote ID: 830
Time Periods: 4
Book Of The Popes (Liber Pontificalis), The
Louise Ropes Loomis
Book ID: 200 Page: 45/46
Section: 2E1
He decreed that deacons should wear dalmatics {5} in church and napkins of mixed wool and linen over their left arms. {6}. . . .
He decreed that the sacrifice of the altar should be performed not upon a cloth of hair nor one that was colored, but only upon linen sprung from the earth, even as the body of our Lord Jesus Christ was buried in pure linen cloth.{1}
Quote ID: 4520
Time Periods: 7
Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization
Will Durant
Book ID: 43 Page: 663
Section: 2E1,2A3
Apparently by his commission she went to Jerusalem, and leveled to the ground the scandalous Temple of Aphrodite that had been built, it was said, over the Saviour’s tomb. According to Eusebius the Holy Sepulcher thereupon came to light, with the very cross to which Christ had died. Constantine ordered a Church of the Holy Sepulcher to be built over the tomb, and the revered relics were preserved in a special shrine. As in classical days the pagan world had cherished and adored the relics of the Trojan War, and even Rome had boasted the Palladium of Troy’s Athene, so now the Christian world, changing its surface and renewing its essence in the immemorial manner of human life, began to collect and worship relics of Christ and the saints. Helena raised a chapel over the traditional site of Jesus’ birth at Bethlehem, modestly served the nuns who ministered there, and then returned to Constantinople to die in the arms of her son.
Quote ID: 953
Time Periods: 4
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 55
Section: 2E1
“The practice of suspending representations of healed body parts, as a demonstration of thanksgiving, the ceremonial burning of candles, even the monastic tonsure may all have been taken over by from the earlier faith.”
Quote ID: 978
Time Periods: 234
Caesars & Saints: The Rise of the Christian State, A.D. 180-313
Stewart Perowne
Book ID: 44 Page: 85
Section: 2E1
in the early centuries, Christians never used the cross as a symbol of their faith.
Quote ID: 991
Time Periods: 147
Cathars: Perfect Heresy, The
Stephen O’Shea
Book ID: 261 Page: 38
Section: 2E1
Lotario had no doubt seen the Lateran’s collection: the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul; the Ark of the Covenant; the Tablets of Moses; the Rod of Aaron; an urn of manna; the Virgin’s tunic; five loaves and two fishes from the Feeding of the Five Thousand; and the dinner table from the Last Supper. The pope’s private chapel held the foreskin and umbilical cord of Jesus. Lotario’s beliefs, like those of the millions he now led, were rooted firmly in the material.
Quote ID: 6548
Time Periods: ?
Cathars: Perfect Heresy, The
Stephen O’Shea
Book ID: 261 Page: 51
Section: 2E1
Often the conflicts verged on the macabre. In 1197, the Trencavels contested the election of a new abbot in the highland monastery of Alet. Their emissary, Bertrand of Saissac, a nobleman with several Cathar Perfect in his family, came up with a novel solution to the dispute. He dug up the body of the former abbot, propped it upright in a chair, then called upon the horrified monks to listen carefully to the corpse’s wishes. Not surprisingly, given such ghoulish encouragement, a friend of the Trencavels easily carried a new election.
Quote ID: 6551
Time Periods: ?
Cathars: Perfect Heresy, The
Stephen O’Shea
Book ID: 261 Page: 144
Section: 2E1,3A2A
Simon ignored the worried looks from his entourage and rode with recovered dignity to the hundreds of knights waiting in the lower town. Bishop Fulk appeared with a relic, a chunk of wood from the True Cross, and implored the soldiers of Christ to kneel and kiss it.
Quote ID: 6586
Time Periods: 7
Cathars: Perfect Heresy, The
Stephen O’Shea
Book ID: 261 Page: 144
Section: 2E1,3A2A,2A3
Horses and men grew impatient. A bishop from the Pyrenees grabbed the relic from Fulk’s hands and gave a collective blessing to the assembly, assuring that those who had died in battle would go directly to heaven.
Quote ID: 6587
Time Periods: 7
Cathars: Perfect Heresy, The
Stephen O’Shea
Book ID: 261 Page: 189
Section: 2E1
She had done not man’s work but Christ’s. Beside her on this memorable Holy Thursday stood her eldest son, Louis. Once grown to manhood, the boy, as King Louis IX, would become the most devout monarch of Europe, eventually earning sainthood for his death on crusade near Tunis.
Quote ID: 6600
Time Periods: ?
Cathars: Perfect Heresy, The
Stephen O’Shea
Book ID: 261 Page: 189
Section: 2E1
Across the island from Notre Dame, he would erect the Gothic masterpiece of the Sainte Chapelle, an exquisite stone reliquary for the treasures he had bought from wily traders: a vial of the Virgin’s milk, the crown of thorns, and dozens of other costly frauds peddled to the credulous crusader king. In watching the spectacle of Raymond VII’s humiliation, the twelve-year-old future saint may have acquired his taste for devotional brio.
Quote ID: 6601
Time Periods: ?
Cathars: Perfect Heresy, The
Stephen O’Shea
Book ID: 261 Page: 277
Section: 2E1,2A3
A lot of relics came on the market following the crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204; thus some of the objects listed...….
For example, Enrico Dandolo, the wily old doge of Venice, brought back from Constantinople the lions that stand in front of St. Mark’s, as well as a piece of the True Cross, the arm of St. George, a vial of Christ’s blood, and a chunk of John the Baptist’s head (source: Marc Kaplan, “Le sac de Constantinople,” in Les Croisades, ed. R. Delort).
Quote ID: 6632
Time Periods: 7
Celtic Sacred Landscapes
Nigel Pennick
Book ID: 51 Page: 25
Section: 2E1,2E5
To this day, St Teilo is the patron of apple trees. In Wales, all trees growing on land dedicated to St Beuno were once deemed sacred, and could not be cut or damaged in any way.
Quote ID: 1131
Time Periods: 7
Celtic Sacred Landscapes
Nigel Pennick
Book ID: 51 Page: 27
Section: 2E1,2E5
To the Greeks and Celts, each ancient deity had her or his own type of holy tree. The oak was sacred to Zeus and Taranis, the myrtle to Aphrodite, the thorn to the Queen of the May. The Scholiast of Aristophanes notes that the olive tree was Athena’s temple and her image before the times of temples and images. Today, certain rose and thorn trees are sacred to Our Lady. (Section called Single Trees)
Quote ID: 1132
Time Periods: 07
Celtic Sacred Landscapes
Nigel Pennick
Book ID: 51 Page: 33
Section: 2E1,2E3
A humorous story is told of St Martin of Tours, who travelled through northern Gaul in the late fourth century, destroying Pagan shrines - and trees in particular. In one place, the local people made a deal with him: he could cut down their holy tree only if he would stand beneath it as it fell. Sensibly, Martin declined their challenge and went elsewhere. (Section called Fairy Thorns and Sacred Places)
Quote ID: 1134
Time Periods: 4
Celtic Sacred Landscapes
Nigel Pennick
Book ID: 51 Page: 47
Section: 2E1
Before it was adopted as an exclusively Christian sign, the cross had geomantic connotations. Cicero, in his De Divinatione, records that the staff with which the Roman augurs marked out the heavens was in the form of a cross. A non-Christian cross of iron was discovered in the remains of the Temple of Mithras near Caernarfon. The Celtic cross itself has provenance in the earliest period recognized as Celtic, six hundred years before Christian worship began.
Quote ID: 1137
Time Periods: 0
Celtic Sacred Landscapes
Nigel Pennick
Book ID: 51 Page: 48
Section: 2E1
In the early days of the Church, megaliths were Christianized by being marked with crosses.
Quote ID: 1138
Time Periods: 4567
Celtic Sacred Landscapes
Nigel Pennick
Book ID: 51 Page: 66
Section: 2E1,2E3
The hot springs at Buxton, known to the Romans as Aqueae Arnemetiae, were sacred to the goddess of the grove, and those at Bath, Aquae Sulis, to Sul, whose name means ‘sun’, but who, as a goddess, was assimilated with the Roman Minerva. Red wells, whose water is coloured by iron deposits, were seen as symbolizing the menstrual blood of the goddess. Later, under Christian influence, the ‘blood’ was transferred to Christ or his martyrs.
Quote ID: 1141
Time Periods: 01234
Celtic Sacred Landscapes
Nigel Pennick
Book ID: 51 Page: 175
Section: 2E1,2E3
Head-shrines in Catholic churches in Celtic and former Celtic lands perpetuate the practice of preserving and venerating the heads of ancestors and heroes.
Quote ID: 1154
Time Periods: 7
Celtic Sacred Landscapes
Nigel Pennick
Book ID: 51 Page: 177
Section: 2E1,2E3
Paradoxically, it was not Celtic or even Catholic Christianity that led to the comprehensive destruction of Celtic sacred places, rather it was the Reformation. When the Roman Catholic Church was suppressed in Britain, sacred places were deliberately destroyed for being alleged objects of superstition. Both Catholic and Pagan observance were extirpated together. A Scottish Parliamentary Act of 1581, epitomizes the attitude of the Puritans:The Dregs of Idolatry yet remain in divers Parts of the Realm by using of Pilgrimage to some Chapels, Wells, Crosses, and such other Monuments of Idolatry, as also by observing the Festal days of the Saints sometime Named their Patrons in setting forth of Bon-Fires, singing of Carols within and about Kirks at certain Seasons of the Year.
Quote ID: 1155
Time Periods: 7
Christian Priesthood Examined
Richard Hanson
Book ID: 55 Page: 33
Section: 2E1
It is a universal tendency in the Christian religion, as in many other religions, to give a theological interpretation to institutions which have developed gradually through a period of time for the sake of practical usefulness, and then to read that interpretation back into the earliest periods and infancy of these institutions, attaching them to an age when in fact nobody imagined that they had such a meaning. The simplest and least controversial example of this is the case of ecclesiastical garments, whether these are chasuble, amice, stole and alb or surplice, cope and mitre. Almost all these garments were first assumed for some non-theological reason. Either they were the ordinary wear for grand occasions of a layman of the time when they were adopted, or they were assumed in order to keep the wearer warm in cold climates or cool in hot climates, or they even (as in the case of the mitre) had originally a political rather than a theological significance. But in later ages religious fancy set to work on them and attributed to them all sorts of edifying theological reasons and symbolism: they stood for humility, for purity, they were emblems of the yoke of Christ or the linen towel with which he girded himself at the last supper, and so on.
Quote ID: 1236
Time Periods: 24
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 130
Section: 2E1
What could one do, after all, with a man frank to acknowledge to the chief of his churches, “We have received from Divine Providence the supreme favor of being relieved from all error”?{93} Meanwhile a rule had been broken. A jeweled gold image of Jesus was provided to the Peter shrine by the emperor at Xystus’ request.Pastor John’s Note: Constantine
Quote ID: 1347
Time Periods: 456
Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 57 Page: 131
Section: 2E1
Eusebius goes on to mention the plant found nowhere else but at the foot of the Jesus statue, growing in the dirt that gathered there, which the pious picked and used for healing. Just so, the pious picked simples and herbs in Artemis’ temenos at Ephesus. Whatever place plants grew, near a grave or in a cemetery or a sacred precinct, it had much to do with their medicinal properties.
Quote ID: 1349
Time Periods: 456
Christianizing the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 58 Page: 47
Section: 2E1,3C
Commemorating his victory in 324, Constantine’s mints in his new eastern domains issued coins showing him spearing Licinius (portrayed as a nasty dragon) with the staff of a little battle flag. On the flag was the Chi-Rho, or Christogram.. . .and his sons adopted the same symbolism. But it was so empty of religious meaning by the 350’s that it could be displayed by a non-Christian, the pretender Magnentius, in issue after the issue for years.
Quote ID: 1441
Time Periods: 4
Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, The
John Hale
Book ID: 202 Page: 200
Section: 2E1
When the great Vatican obelisk, originally erected in Alexandria by the quasi-divine Emperor Augustus, was laboriously winched upright in front of St Peter’s in Rome in 1586, Pope Sixtus V thought putting a fragment of the true cross on top would suffice to exorcise its pagan significance.
Quote ID: 4627
Time Periods: 6
Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, The
John Hale
Book ID: 202 Page: 444
Section: 2A3,2E1
Relics, too, had this power to comfort, not so much the more esoteric ones which strained even unsophisticated belief, like the Virgin’s nightgown in Aachen or the water in which she had washed Jesus’s baby clothes in Cairo, or his foreskin, cut off at his circumcision (Calvin, not a widely travelled man, had seen three of them), but bits of bone and fingernail and hair that passed the current of hope directly between worshipper and protector…
Quote ID: 4638
Time Periods: 7
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 213
Section: 3C,2E1
The Crucifixion is rarely depicted before the fourth century. As to Constantine’s alleged vision of the cross in the sky, followed by his employment of the cruciform labarum-monogram XP (=Christos) (p. 236), the cross meant magic more than anything else to him, and in any case it stood not so much for the Passion as for the Resurrection – a new era and a new stage in the divine plan.
Quote ID: 4757
Time Periods: 4
Climax of Rome, The
Michael Grant
Book ID: 204 Page: 230/231
Section: 2E1
And the faithful threw their clothes on the place where Cyprian himself was to be executed, in the hope that they would soak up his blood.
Quote ID: 4768
Time Periods: 3
Constantine and Eusebius
Timothy D. Barnes
Book ID: 64 Page: 248
Section: 2E1,3C
A shrine of Aphrodite occupied the site a basilica built over the site of the crucifixion and what was believed to be Christ’s tomb until Constantine ordered its demolition. Excavations were made under the ruins until a tomb was discovered, which appears to have contained not a body, but some wood, which its finders identified as the cross on which Christ was crucified. Constantine, and Christians in general, hailed the discovery as manifest proof of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection.
Quote ID: 1649
Time Periods: 4
Constantine by Ramsay Macmullen
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 69 Page: 72/73/74
Section: 2E1,3C,3C2
Constantine one night was told in a vision to paint on his soldiers’ shields the sign of God, which would bring victory. It is described as the letter CHI, turned (not X but +), and the top in a loop (symbol). He followed instructions, equipping a few score of his guard with the sign, we may suppose-hardly all forty thousand!Lactantius is the source followed here.
….
He was a devout Christian; yet he disposes of the whole miracle in thirty-one words. Pagan orators of 313 and 321, to whom we will return, speak only vaguely and briefly of divine aid to Constantine; a triumphal arch erected in 315 at the senate’s orders connects the victory not with Christ but with the Sun-God.
Among Christian sources, Eusebius has nothing to say about the vision in a work otherwise receptive to the miraculous (the Ecclesiastical History of 325), and in 336, in a long oration, he lays stress on the sign of the cross as bringer of victory, and in Constantine’s presence refers to “the divine vision of the Savior which has often shone on you”; but he never puts cross and visions together in any reference to the events of 312. The emperor himself ignores them in contexts where they might naturally find a place, and an intimate of his son’s (Cyril of Jerusalem) in mid-century assures Constantius II that the sight of a cross marked in the sky by a recent meteor is a greater grace than even the true cross that his father found in the Holy Land. The passage, of course, fairly cries out for mention of Constantine’s vision. Farther removed, Ambrose knew nothing of it; Rufinus puts it in the setting of a dream. With Rufinus, we reach the fifth century. The miracle has simply had no impact. It has passed unnoticed among real men. But it was otherwise in the world of books, in which by this time much fuller versions circulated.
They originated in Eusebius’ effusive Life of Constantine, composed after the subject’s death.
…
In 312, at some unspecified spot seemingly in Gaul, and in answer to prayer, he saw the sign of the cross blazing in the afternoon sky, and around it the words, “In this, conquer.” His entire army saw it, too.
…
if the skywriting was witnessed by forty thousand men, the true miracle lies in their unbroken silence about it. We may compare another instance of intervention from on high. A violent rainstorm descended once on Marcus Aurelius’ enemies out of the blue and drove them off the battlefield. This was really seen by thousands. Marcus Aurelius, on coins and relief sculpture, advertised this proof that Jupiter fought on his side. Why did Constantine not do likewise?
Quote ID: 1878
Time Periods: 4
Constantine by Ramsay Macmullen
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 69 Page: 119
Section: 2E1
If Constantine seemed to be using up too much of the empire’s strength too fast, in the remarkable patronage that he extended to the Church in Rome and to many farther areas of the West as well, yet in the process he laid the foundations for something of the first importance. The basilical church came into being in his reign.
Quote ID: 1888
Time Periods: 4
Constantine the Great
Michael Grant
Book ID: 66 Page: 203
Section: 2E1,3C
While in Palestine, Helena committed her son, who encouraged and prompted her, to the payment of enormous sums for building churches. And when she left the country, she took with her some pieces of wood which, she was told and believed, had formed the True Cross - a fortunate, though dubious, discovery. In order to find them, she had made enquiries among the local people, who advised her to proceed to a place where ’ancient persecutors’ had built a shrine of the pagan goddess Aphrodite.Stimulated by visions, she ordered that the site should be excavated, whereupon, according to St. Ambrose’s work On the Death of Theodosius (De Obitu Theodosii, 395), three crosses were according to the New Testament, had set up, on the occasion of the Crucifixion of Jesus, in Hebrew, Greek and Latin. It next remained to discover which of the three crosses was the one on which Jesus had died. Here Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem came to Helena’s help, by undertaking, with a prayer for God’s help, to place a sick woman on each of the crosses in turn, so that is could then be seen what happened to her on each of the three occasions. When she was placed on the first two crosses, nothing happened. Next, however, she was made to lie on the third cross, whereupon she was healed. That, it was concluded, must have been the True Cross on which Jesus had met his death.
In consequence, Helena built a church on the spot, and lodged parts of the Cross there in silver caskets. The remaining parts she sent to Constantine, together with nails from the same Cross, which was incorporated in the bit of his war-horse.
Quote ID: 1780
Time Periods: 4
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 15/16
Section: 2E1
Lenny Bruce, the Jewish shockmeister, used to send a naughty thrill up the spines of his audiences by professing relief that Jesus wasn’t born in twentieth-century America, because then, Bruce would blithely aver, pious Christians would have to wear tiny electric chairs around their necks. In fact, the cross did not serve as a Christian icon until it ceased being a Roman execution device in the fourth century.
Quote ID: 1808
Time Periods: 4
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 174
Section: 2E1
Before Constantine, the cross lacked religious and symbolic significance....Water had a vivid hold on the Christian imagination; wood did not.
Pastor John notes: this author’s theme is that the cult of the cross led to hatred of the Jews.
Quote ID: 1819
Time Periods: 4
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 175
Section: 2E1
...on the walls of the catacombs in Rome prior to the fourth century were to be seen representations of palm branches, the dove, the peacock, the bird of paradise, or the monogram of Jesus.{9}
Quote ID: 1820
Time Periods: 123
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 175
Section: 2E1
Such symbols were ubiquitous in early Christianity, but the cross is simply not to be found among them. Some early Christians signed themselves, touching the forehead, shoulders, and breast, but even that is ambiguous, since, as we saw, Jews were known to make a similar sign.The place of the cross in the Christian imagination changed with Constantine. “He said that about noon when the day was already beginning to decline” -- this is Eusebius’s account of Constantine’s own report of what he saw in the sky on the eve of battle above the Milvian Bridge -- “he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing the inscription CONQUER BY THIS.”{11}
Quote ID: 1821
Time Periods: 4
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 175
Section: 2E1
...from Eusebius’s account, not of the vision but of Constantine’s own description of it, the actual “figure of the cross” is clearly what is meant. Constantine put the Roman execution device...at the center not only of the story of his conversion to Christianity, but of the Christian story itself.
Quote ID: 1822
Time Periods: 4
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 194
Section: 3C,2E1
It is not my purpose here to deny or establish the authenticity of Constantine’s account, but only to observe that his choice of that first ever council meeting at Nicaea as the place from which to promulgate his vision of the cross as a foundational myth of the church-state and state-church reveals a kind of imaginative genius.
Quote ID: 1838
Time Periods: 4
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 197
Section: 2E1
Saint Cyril, a successor bishop of Jerusalem, writing in 351 to a successor emperor, Constantine’s son Constantius II, connects the dots by tying the Milvian Bridge vision to the discovered True Cross in Jerusalem. “For if in the days of your imperial father, Constantine of blessed memory, the saving wood of the Cross was found in Jerusalem...”
Quote ID: 1840
Time Periods: 4
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 198/199
Section: 2E1
There is, one should add, another reason besides theology that Eusebius would have chosen to ignore any report of a recovered True Cross in Jerusalem. As bishop of Caesarea, he was the primate of Palestine....The attention given to Jerusalem by the emperor and his mother had to alarm Eusebius. A shrine containing relics of the True Cross, drawing pilgrims and power, could only undercut the prestige of Caesarea. In the event, with the legend of the True Cross taking hold, Caesarea did fade as the world importance of Jerusalem grew. {9} It was an early lesson in the politics of relics.
Quote ID: 1842
Time Periods: 4
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 199
Section: 2E1,2A3
The cult of Helena would explode in the late fourth century around an elaborately imagined legend -- or rather, set of legends {12} -- that told of her devotion in tracking down not only the True Cross but its nails, the sign Pilate attached to it, various instruments used to torture Jesus, the thorns, the whip, and the Seamless Robe that Jesus wore, a relic to which we will return. How the bodies of the Magi fit into this is not clear, but Helena would also be credited with discovering the site of the Nativity cave in Bethlehem -- relics from womb to tomb.
Quote ID: 1843
Time Periods: 4
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 201
Section: 2E1
the victory includes the dawning of a Christian empire, but that has been delayed until now -- delayed, according to Ambrose, by Satan’s surviving agents, the Jews.
Quote ID: 1845
Time Periods: 4
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 201
Section: 2E1
The cross itself thus becomes a kind of second Incarnation, a salvific turning point by which the will of God is accomplished. Clever Jews knew the Cross had such power. They hid it over the centuries, not just because it was a proof that they had crucified the Lord, but because its revelation would bring about their final defeat. {19} One version of the Helena legend has a Jew being tortured until he agrees to show her where the Cross is buried.
Quote ID: 1846
Time Periods: 4
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 201
Section: 2E1
Ambrose evidently presents Judaism as a force by its nature opposed to Christianity ... and is undoubtedly of the opinion that the emperors should combat Judaism and that the Church and the secular authorities should consider the ruin of Judaism their common cause.” {21}
Quote ID: 1847
Time Periods: 4
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 201
Section: 2E1
Brijvers summarizes Ambrose’s argument against the Jews this way: “They thought they had defeated Christianity by killing Christ, but through the finding of the Cross and the nails, as a result of which Christ and Christianity had come to life again, they themselves were defeated
Quote ID: 8163
Time Periods: 4
Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews
James Carroll
Book ID: 68 Page: 401
Section: 2E1,2A3
Helena, as we saw, is revered for having brought from Jerusalem a nail of the True Cross and relics of Saint Matthias, the apostle elected to replace the traitor Judas. But Helena’s place of honor in Trier is due above all to the Robe of Christ, the tunic attributed to her discovery and preserved in the hidden reliquary of the cathedral.
Quote ID: 1876
Time Periods: 4
Cult of the Saints, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 208 Page: 41
Section: 2E1
Furthermore, such wealth and ceremonial would be deployed in the invisible presence of a figure who had taken on all the features of a late-Roman patronus. The saint was the good patronus: he was the patronus whose intercessions were successful, whose wealth was at the disposal of all, whose potentia was excercised without violence and to whom loyalty could be shown without constraint. The bishop could stand for him. Lavish building, splendid ceremonial, and even feasting at such a shrine washed clean the hard facts of accumulated wealth and patronage, as they were now practiced in real life, even by bishops.
Quote ID: 5086
Time Periods: 4
Cult of the Saints, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 208 Page: 44
Section: 2E1
The saints, as Ambrose pointed out, were the only inlaws that a woman was free to choose.{115} Their shrines offered to half the inhabitants of every late-Roman town respite and protection which they lacked the freedom to find elsewhere.{116}
Quote ID: 5088
Time Periods: 4
Cult of the Saints, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 208 Page: 86
Section: 2E1
In a characteristic moment of penetrating disapproval, Hegel wrote of the piety of the middle ages:The Holy as a mere thing has the character of
externality; thus it is capable of being taken
possession of by another to my exclusion; it
may come into an alien hand, since the process
of appropriating it is not one that takes
place in Spirit, but conditioned by its quality
as an external object. The highest of human
blessings is in the hands of others.{1}
Quote ID: 5092
Time Periods: 7
Cult of the Saints, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 208 Page: 87
Section: 2E1
At the shrine of Saint Peter, a whole ritual of access was played out:Whoever wishes to pray there (writes Gregory of Tours)
must unlock the gates which encircle the spot, pass to where
he is above the grave and, opening a little window, push his
head through and there make the supplication that he needs.{9}
Quote ID: 5093
Time Periods: 6
Cult of the Saints, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 208 Page: 88
Section: 2E1,2A3
A yearning for proximity kept so carefully in suspense occasionally exploded. The Carthaginian noblewoman Megetia, as we have seen, had committed herself to the “therapy of distance” by traveling away from her family to the shrine of Saint Stephen in nearby Uzalis.{13} But she could not rest at that: While she prayed at the place of the holy relic shrine, she beat against it, not only with the longings of her heart, but with her whole body so that the little grille in front of the relic opened at the impact; and she , taking the Kingdom of Heaven by storm, pushed her head inside and laid it on the holy relics resting there, drenching them with her tears.{14}
Quote ID: 5094
Time Periods: 4
Cult of the Saints, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 208 Page: 119
Section: 2E1,2A3
Gregory of Tours For this is the conflict which holds the attention of Gregory of Tours--- Reverentia implied a willingness to focus belief on precise invisible persons, on Christ and his friends the saints----the amici dominici {68}---in such a way as to commit the believer to definite rhythms in his life (such as the observation of the holy days of the saints), to direct his attention to specific sites and objects (the shrines and relics of the saints), to react to illness and to danger by dependence on these invisible persons, and to remain constantly aware, in the play of human action around him, that good and bad fortune was directly related to good or bad relations with these invisible persons. Reverentia, therefore, assumed a high degree of social and cultural grooming. It was not a luxuriant undergrowth of credulity or neopaganism. It involved learning an etiquette toward the supernatural, whose every gesture was carefully delineated. Hence the importance for Gregory of its antithesis, rusticitas, which is best translated as “boorishness,” “slipshodness”---the failure, or the positive refusal, to give life structure in terms of ceremonious relationships with specific invisible persons.{69}
Quote ID: 5100
Time Periods: 6
Cult of the Saints, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 208 Page: 120
Section: 2E1
The advance of Christianity beyond the towns was the advance of the praesentia of the saints.{75}
Quote ID: 5103
Time Periods: ?
Cult of the Saints, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 208 Page: 121
Section: 2E1
It was a silent subsidence more drastic than the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and more irreversible than the passing of the urban gods of Greco-Roman paganism. In the countryside and the towns of Gaul and Spain the praesentia of the saints reaped the fruits of a belated and largely unwitting triumph of Romanization. For the spread of Christian reverentia made final the processes by which the indigenous cultures of the western Mediterranean had been imperceptibly eroded by a slow but sure pressure from on top exercised through the grid of administration and patronage relationships that had reached ever outwards over the centuries from the towns and from the country villas of the great.{78} A century after the end of the Western Empire, Gregory and his contemporaries could now be certain that, if all roads no longer ran to Rome, in the Touraine, at least, they would all run to Tours, ad dominum Martinum:(Greek words) a speck of dust from his shrine was worth more than all the immemorial cunning of the village healers.{79}
Quote ID: 5105
Time Periods: 6
Cult of the Saints, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 208 Page: 154
Section: 2E1
59. On the final draining of significance from the archangels in medieval Italian art, as these are replaced by human intercessors such as the Virgin.
Quote ID: 5109
Time Periods: 7
Cult of the Saints, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 208 Page: 154
Section: 2E1
(Paris: Klincksieck, 1968): 189-98. Angels carried with them associations of the absolute monarchy of God, surrounded by his servants and not open to manipulation by patronage: E. Peterson, The Angels and the Liturgy (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964): 25. Their continued importance in the Byzantine world is due, in part, to the fact that the surviving Eastern Empire was a society in which patronage, though current, never emerged as unambiguously as in the West as the only viable alternative to absolute government through a bureaucratic hierarchy of stable ranks.
Quote ID: 5110
Time Periods: 7
Cults of the Roman Empire, The
Robert Turcan
Book ID: 209 Page: 111
Section: 2E1
This water was piously kept in store, ‘holy’ water said to have come from the Nile.
Quote ID: 5156
Time Periods: ?
Cults of the Roman Empire, The
Robert Turcan
Book ID: 209 Page: 143
Section: 2E1
‘So the superstitious Syrians hold it a sacrilege to serve it at table and refuse to soil their mouth by eating fish.’
Quote ID: 5168
Time Periods: ?
Cults of the Roman Empire, The
Robert Turcan
Book ID: 209 Page: 165
Section: 2E1
Following a practice attested in both the traditional Roman and Mother-worship cults, the defleshed heads or ‘bucrania’ of sacrificed bulls were displayed on the altars or walls of the temple.
Quote ID: 5170
Time Periods: ?
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Vol. 2, The
Edward Gibbon
Book ID: 210 Page: 39/40
Section: 2E1,4B
It was in the choice of Cyprian either to die a martyr or to live an apostate, but on that choice depended the alternative of honour or infamy.. . . .
The assurance of a lasting reputation upon earth, a motive so congenial to the vanity of human nature, often served to animate the courage of the martyrs. The honours which Rome or Athens bestowed on those citizens who had fallen in the cause of their country were cold and unmeaning demonstrations of respect, when compared with the ardent gratitude and devotion which the primitive church expressed towards the victorious champions of the faith. The annual commemoration of their virtues and sufferings was observed as a sacred ceremony, and at length terminated in religious worship.
Quote ID: 5193
Time Periods: 3
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Vol. 3, The
Edward Gibbon
Book ID: 319 Page: 162/163
Section: 2E1,2A3
…in the age of Ambrose and Jerom something was still deemed wanting to the sanctity of a Christian church, till it had been consecrated by some portion of holy relics, which fixed and inflamed the devotion of the faithful. In the long period of twelve hundred years, which elapsed between the reign of Constantine and the reformation of Luther, the worship of saints and relics corrupted the pure and perfect simplicity of the Christian model; and some symptoms of degeneracy may be observed even in the first generations which adopted and cherished this pernicious innovation.
Quote ID: 7719
Time Periods: 457
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Vol. 3, The
Edward Gibbon
Book ID: 319 Page: 163
Section: 2E1
Without much regard for truth or probability, they invented names for skeletons, and actions for names. The fame of the apostles, and of the holy men who had imitated their virtues, was darkened by religious fiction.….
A superstitious practice, which tended to increase the temptations of fraud and credulity, insensibly extinguished the light of history and of reason in the Christian world.
Quote ID: 7720
Time Periods: ?
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Vol. 3, The
Edward Gibbon
Book ID: 319 Page: 167
Section: 2E1
The sublime and simple theology of the primitive Christians was gradually corrupted: and the MONARCHY of heaven, already clouded by metaphysical subtleties, was degraded by the introduction of a popular mythology which tended to restore the reign of polytheseim.{2}
Quote ID: 7721
Time Periods: ?
Dictionary of Roman Religion
Lesley Adkins and Roy A. Adkins
Book ID: 73 Page: 12
Section: 2E1
apex (Figs. 6, 32) (pl. apices) A close-fitting conical hat or cap worn by flamines and some other priests out of doors.
Quote ID: 2028
Time Periods: ?
Documents of the Christian Church
Edited by Henry Bettenson & Chris Maunder
Book ID: 74 Page: 196
Section: 2E1
8. That pilgrimages, prayers, and offerings made to blind crosses or roods, and to deaf images of wood or stone, are pretty well akin to idolatry and far from alms, and although these be forbidden and imaginary,
Quote ID: 2066
Time Periods: ?
Early Christian Church, The
J.G. Davies
Book ID: 214 Page: 199
Section: 2E1,2E3,3C
In the year 326 or 327 Constantine wrote to Macarius, bishop of Jerusalem, concerning his projected church of the Holy Sepulchre, in the following terms:“I desire, therefore, especially that you should be persuaded of that which I suppose is evident to all beside, namely, that I have no greater care than how I may best adorn with a splendid structure that sacred spot...a spot which has been accounted holy from the beginning in God’s judgement, but which now appears holier still, since it has brought to light a clear assurance of our Saviour’s passion.”
Quote ID: 5328
Time Periods: 4
Early Christian Church, The
J.G. Davies
Book ID: 214 Page: 209
Section: 2E1
Within the churches the main item of furniture was the altar, which continued to have the form and shape of a dining-table. . .Constantine presented S. Peter’s with a silver altar ‘inlaid with gold, decorated with green and white jewels and jacinths on all sides, the number of the jewels being 400, the weight 350 lb’.
Facing the nave was a seated figure of Christ, 5 feet high and weighing 120lb., flanked by two apostles, each 5 feet tall and 90 lb. In weight; along the sides were disposed the remaining apostles and at the rear, facing the apse, was another seated Christ with two angels, weighing 105 lb. Each and holding rods; the whole structure was of pure gold.
Next in importance to the altar as an article of furniture was the bishop’s seat, usually known as the throne in the East and the cathedra in the West. This kind of chair was common in the early days of the empire and was later adopted by rhetoricians and philosophers, the bishops readily transferring to the basilica the seat from which many had given lessons in the schools.
Readings from the Scriptures, however, took place from a special desk no doubt taken over from the synagogue.
Quote ID: 5334
Time Periods: 4
Early Christian Church, The
J.G. Davies
Book ID: 214 Page: 210
Section: 2E1
The ‘desk’ soon assumed the shape of a pulpit, and as it was ascended (anabaino) by a flight of stairs it was given the name ambon.
Quote ID: 5335
Time Periods: ?
End of Ancient Christianity, The
Robert Markus
Book ID: 219 Page: 24
Section: 2E1
If the saint’s tomb is the place where Heaven and Earth meet, it is also the place where the Church’s past and its present meet.
Quote ID: 5403
Time Periods: ?
End of Ancient Christianity, The
Robert Markus
Book ID: 219 Page: 24
Section: 2E1
the historical consciousness of post-Constantinian Christians
Quote ID: 5404
Time Periods: 4
End of Ancient Christianity, The
Robert Markus
Book ID: 219 Page: 99/100
Section: 2E1
Until, in the course of the third century, Christians began to enter the mainstream of Roman life in sizeable numbers, their main need was for a calendar of religious observance which would set them apart from the Jews. Thus the earliest surviving Church order tells the faithful not to fast at the same times as do the ‘hypocrites’, on Mondays and Thursdays, but on Wednesdays and Fridays.{9} The Lord’s day superseded the Sabbath and Easter the Passover. The date of Easter was, eventually, to be reckoned in such a way as to make coincidence impossible.{10} Their calendar thus assured Christians of a group identity distinct from the Jews.
Quote ID: 5424
Time Periods: 3
Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000
Julia M. H. Smith
Book ID: 83 Page: 34
Section: 2E1
The Irish chose to keep their sacred books in Latin. They seized with enthusiasm upon the dictum of Isidore of Seville, that, among the variety of tongues after the Tower of Babel, there were three ‘sacred languages’, those of the sign posted over the dying Christ on the cross (John 19:19-20) and of the Bible: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.{22} For the Irish, the sacred books remained in the sacred language.
Quote ID: 2173
Time Periods: 67
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History Books, LCL 153: Eusebius I, Books 1-5
Eusebius
Book ID: 141 Page: 183
Section: 2E1,2D3A
Book II chapter XXV. . . .the leader of the Montanists, {1} speaks as follows of the places where the sacred relics of the Apostles in question are deposited: “But I can point out the trophies of the Apostles, for if you will go to the Vatican or to the Ostian Way you will find the trophies of those who founded this Church.” {2}
Quote ID: 3077
Time Periods: 1234
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History Books, LCL 153: Eusebius I, Books 1-5
Eusebius
Book ID: 141 Page: 271
Section: 2E1
Book III chapter XXXIJohn has also been already {1} mentioned, and the place of his body is shown by a letter of Polycrates (he was bishop of the diocese of Ephesus) which he wrote to Victor, bishop of Rome.
Quote ID: 3088
Time Periods: 2
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, LCL 265: Eusebius II, Books 6-10
J.E.L. Oulton
Book ID: 142 Page: 363
Section: 2E1,3C2
Constantine by his very deeds sang to God the Ruler of all and Author of the victory; then he entered Rome with hymns of triumph, and all the senators and other persons of great note, together with women and quite young children and all the Roman people, received him in a body with beaming countenances to their very heart as a ransomer, saviour, and benefactor, with praises and insatiable joy. But he, as one possessed of natural piety towards God, was by no means stirred by their shouts nor uplifted by their praises, for well he knew that his help was from God; and straightway he gave orders that a memorial of the Saviour’s Passion should be set up in the hand of his own statue; and indeed when they set him in the most public place in Rome holding the Saviour’s sign in his right hand, he bade them engrave this very inscription in these words in the Latin tongue: “By this salutary sign, the true proof of bravery, I saved and delivered your city from the yoke of the tyrant; and moreover I freed and restored to their ancient fame and splendour both the senate and the people of the Romans.”
Quote ID: 3112
Time Periods: 4
Eusebius, NPNF2 Vol. 1, Eusebius Pamphilius: Church History, Life of Constantine, Oration in Praise of Constantine
Edited by Philip Schaff
Book ID: 668 Page: 444
Section: 2E1,3C
7. The Finding of the Cross.
It is said in a certain “tolerably authentic chronicle,” according to Voragine, that Constantine sent his mother Helena to Jerusalem to try to find the cross on which our Lord was crucified. When she arrived, she bade all the Jewish Rabbis of the whole land gather to meet her. Great was their fear. They suspected that she sought the wood of the cross, a secret which they had promised not to reveal even under torture, because it would mean the end of Jewish supremacy. When they met her, sure enough, she asked for the place of the crucifixion. When they would not tell, she ordered them all to be burned. Frightened, they delivered up Judas, their leader and instigator, saying that he could tell. She gave him his choice of telling or dying by starvation. At first he was obstinate, but six days of total abstinence from food brought him to terms, and on the seventh he promised. He was conducted to the place indicated, and in response to prayer, there was a sort of earthquake, and a perfume filled the air which converted Judas. There was a temple of Venus on the spot. This the queen had destroyed. Then Judas set to digging vigorously, and at the depth of twenty feet, found three crosses, which he brought to Helena. The true cross was tested by its causing a man to rise from the dead, or according to others, by healing a woman, or according to others, by finding the inscription of Pilate. After an exceedingly vigorous conversation between the devil and Judas, the latter was baptized and became Bishop Cyriacus. Then Helena set him hunting for the nails of the cross. He found them shining like gold and brought them to the queen, who departed, taking them and a portion of the wood of the cross. She brought the nails to Constantine, who put them on his bridle and helmet.
Pastor John’s footnote reference: NPNF2, Vol.1, 444. The Life of Constantine, Prolegomena, IV.7.
Quote ID: 9557
Time Periods: 4
Eusebius, NPNF2 Vol. 1, Eusebius Pamphilius: Church History, Life of Constantine, Oration in Praise of Constantine
Edited by Philip Schaff
Book ID: 668 Page: 594
Section: 2E1
All these places our emperor thus adorned in the hope of proclaiming the symbol of redemption to all mankind; that Cross which has indeed repaid his pious zeal; through which his house and throne alike have prospered.Pastor John’s footnote reference: Eusebius, “Oration in Praise of Constantine”, IX.17–18.
Quote ID: 9617
Time Periods: 4
Eusebius, NPNF2 Vol. 1, Eusebius Pamphilius: Church History, Life of Constantine, Oration in Praise of Constantine
Edited by Philip Schaff
Book ID: 668 Page: 594
Section: 2E1
Much might indeed be said of this salutary Sign, by those who are skilled in the mysteries of our Divine religion. For it is in very truth the symbol of salvation….Pastor John’s footnote reference: Eusebius, “Oration in Praise of Constantine”, X.1.
Quote ID: 9618
Time Periods: 4
Eusebius, NPNF2 Vol. 1, Eusebius Pamphilius: Church History, Life of Constantine, Oration in Praise of Constantine
Edited by Philip Schaff
Book ID: 668 Page: 594
Section: 2E1
Such are the blessings resulting to mankind from this great and wondrous Sign, by virtue of which the evils which once existed are now no more….Pastor John’s footnote reference: Eusebius, “Oration in Praise of Constantine”, X.3.
Quote ID: 9619
Time Periods: 4
Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages
Patrick J. Geary
Book ID: 94 Page: 21
Section: 2E1
Chapter 1 section The Evolution of Saints’ Cults in the Central Middle AgesSaints were also fund-raisers. The translation of Saint Foy to Conques was justified as necessary for the health and salvation of the area. The second aim is impossible to judge, but the saint was certainly successful in supporting the economic health of Conques for centuries.
Quote ID: 2420
Time Periods: 7
Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages
Patrick J. Geary
Book ID: 94 Page: 53
Section: 2E1
Chapter 3 The ProfessionalsFinally, owing again to the peculiar nature of relics, Rome and the pope gave up very little in allowing some to be removed, stolen, sold, or carried away. The fact that Eugenius II had given the body of Saint Sebastian to Hilduin in 825 did not prevent Gregory IV from solemnly translating the body of that saint martyr from the catacomb in which it lay to an altar in the chapel of Gregory the Great in Saint Peter’s. {40}
Pastor John notes: John’s note: What?
Quote ID: 2448
Time Periods: 7
God’s Secretaries: - The Making of the King James Bible
Adam Nicolson
Book ID: 99 Page: 36
Section: 2E1
One needs reminding, perhaps, of just how passionate was the loathing among Puritans of that symbolic strain in the English Church. Few modern Christians, however severe, would be quite as brave as Richard Parker, the author of A Scholasticall Discourse against Symbolizing with AntiChrist in Ceremonies: especially in the Signe of the Crosse, published in London in 1607, who was keen to point out to the ignorant, at some length, ‘the idolatrie of the Crosse, the Superstition of the Crosse, the Hipocrisie of the Crosse, the impietie of the Crosse, the injustice of the Crosse and the soule murther of the Crosse’. The cross was ‘a part of deuill worship. . . The vsing of the Crosse is but an idle apishe toye, and lighter than the surplice which is also too light.’
Quote ID: 2520
Time Periods: ?
God’s Secretaries: - The Making of the King James Bible
Adam Nicolson
Book ID: 99 Page: 229/230
Section: 3A1,2E1
The relationship of Puritan church and Puritan state in early America soon became, strangely enough, as close as any relationship between the Jacobean Crown and the Church of England. In early Massachusetts, heresy, witchcraft, profanity, blasphemy, idolatry and breaking the Sabbath were all civil offences, to be dealt with by civil courts. The new Americans may have dispensed with bishops, surplices and the Book of Common Prayer, but they had not replaced them with a Utopia of religious freedom. Seventeenth-century America was a country of strictly enforced state religion and as such needed a Bible much more attuned to the necessities of nation-building than anything the Separatists’ Geneva Bible could offer. It is one of the strangest of historical paradoxes that the King James Bible, whose whole purpose had been nation-building in the service of a ceremonial and episcopal state church, should become the guiding text of Puritan America.
Quote ID: 2536
Time Periods: 7
History of the Franks
Gregory Bishop of Tours
Book ID: 110 Page: x/xi
Section: 2E1,3A1,4B,2A3
However the natural advantages of Tours at this time were surpassed by the supernatural ones. Thanks to the legend of St. Martin this conveniently situated city had become “the religious metropolis” of Gaul. St. Martin had made a great impression on his generation.{1}....
[Footnote 1] In France, including Alsace and Lorraine, there are at the present time three thousand six hundred and seventy-five churches dedicated to St. Martin, and four hundred and twenty-five villages or hamlets are named after him. C. Bayet, in Lavisse, Histoire de France, 2I, p. 16.
He belonged to the privileged classes. Of his father’s family he tells us that “in the Gauls none could be found better born or nobler,” and of his mother’s that it was “a great and leading family.” On both his father’s and his mother’s side he was of senatorial rank, a distinction of the defunct Roman empire which still retained much meaning in central and southern Gaul. But the great distinction open at this time to a Gallo-Roman was the powerful and envied office of bishop. Men of the most powerful families struggled to attain this office and we can therefore judge of Gregory’s status when he tells us proudly that of the bishops of Tours from the beginning all but five were connected with him by ties of kinship.
In spite of all these advantages, under the externals of Christianity, Gregory was almost as superstitious as a savage. His superstition came to him straight from his father and mother and from his whole social environment. He tells us that his father, when expecting in 534 to go as hostage to king Theodobert’s court, went to “a certain bishop” and asked for relics to protect him. These were furnished to him in the shape of dust or “sacred ashes” and he put them in a little gold case the shape of a pea-pod and wore them about his neck, although he never knew the names of the saints whose relics they were.
Quote ID: 2640
Time Periods: 7
History of the Franks
Gregory Bishop of Tours
Book ID: 110 Page: 34
Section: 2E1
Now after the death of the bishop Rusticus, saint Namatius became the eighth bishop of Clermont. He undertook the task of building the older church which is still standing and is contained within the walls of the city,....
The blessed bishop on finishing the building in the twelfth year, sent priests to Bologna in Italy, to procure relics of saints Agricola and Vitalis, who we know very certainly were crucified in the name of Christ our God.
Quote ID: 2645
Time Periods: 6
Jerome, NPNF2 Vol. 6, Jerome: The Principal Works of St. Jerome
Edited by Philip Schaff
Book ID: 673 Page: 417
Section: 2E1
In this fellow the corrupt mind of Jovinianus has arisen; so that in him, no less than in his predecessor, we are bound to meet the snares of the devil.
Pastor John notes: John’s note: ?
Quote ID: 9636
Time Periods: 45
Jerome, NPNF2 Vol. 6, Jerome: The Principal Works of St. Jerome
Edited by Philip Schaff
Book ID: 673 Page: 417
Section: 2E1
According to the trick which he knows of old, he is trying to blend his perfidious poison with the Catholic faith; he assails virginity and hates chastity; he revels with worldings and declaims against the fasts of the saints.
Quote ID: 9637
Time Periods: 45
Jerome, NPNF2 Vol. 6, Jerome: The Principal Works of St. Jerome
Edited by Philip Schaff
Book ID: 673 Page: 420
Section: 2E1,2A3
All those who light these tapers have their reward according to their faith, as the Apostle says:{4} “Let every one abound in his own meaning.” Do you call men of this sort idolaters?
In the one case respect was paid to idols, and therefore the ceremony is to be abhorred; in the other the martyrs are venerated and the same ceremony is therefore to be allowed.
Pastor John note: not the issue
Does the bishop of Rome do wrong when he offers sacrifices to the Lord over the venerable bones of the dead men Peter and Paul, as we should say, but according to you, over a worthless bit of dust, and judges their tombs worthy to be Christ’s altars? And not only is the bishop of one city in error, but the bishops of the whole world, who, despite the tavern-keeper Vigilantius, enter the basilicas of the dead, in which “a worthless bit of dust and ashes lies wrapped up in a cloth,” defiled and defiling all else. Thus, according to you, the sacred buildings are like the sepulchres of the Pharisees, whitened without, while within they have filthy remains, and are full of foul smells and uncleanliness. And then he dares to expectorate his fifth upon the subject and to say: “Is it the case that the souls of the martyrs love their ashes, and hover round them, and are always present, lest haply if any one come to pray and they were absent, they could not hear? Oh, monster, who ought to be banished to the ends of the earth! do you laugh at the relics of the martyrs?”
Quote ID: 9641
Time Periods: 45
Jerome, NPNF2 Vol. 6, Jerome: The Principal Works of St. Jerome
Edited by Philip Schaff
Book ID: 673 Page: 421
Section: 2E1,2A3
And so I will not have you tell me that signs are for the unbelieving; but answer my question--how is it that poor worthless dust and ashes are associated with this wondrous power of sign and miracles? I see, I see, most unfortunate of mortals, why you are so sad and what causes you fear. That unclean spirit who forces you to write these things has often been tortured by this worthless dust, aye, and is being tortured at this moment, and though in your case he conceals his wounds, in others he makes confession.
Let me give you my advice: go to the basilicas of the martyrs, and some day you will be cleansed; you will find there many in like case with yourself, and will be set on fire, not by the martyrs’ tapers which offend you, but by invisible flames; and you will then confess what you now deny.
Quote ID: 9645
Time Periods: 45
John Calvin’s Treatise on Relics
John Calvin
Book ID: 710 Page: ?
Section: 2E1
Chapter 1: Origin Of The Worship Of Relics And Images In The Christian ChurchHero-worship is innate to human nature, and it is founded on some of our noblest feelings,―gratitude, love, and admiration,―but which, like all other feelings, when uncontrolled by principle and reason, may easily degenerate into the wildest exaggerations, and lead to most dangerous consequences. It was by such an exaggeration of these noble feelings that Paganism filled the Olympus with gods and demigods,―elevating to this rank men who have often deserved the gratitude of their fellow-creatures, by some signal services rendered to the community, or their admiration, by having performed some deeds which required a more than usual degree of mental and physical powers.
Quote ID: 9890
Time Periods: 047
Journal of Early Christian Studies: Journal of the North American Patristics Society Volume 20 / Number 1 / Spring 2012
The John Hopkins University Press
Book ID: 121 Page: 66
Section: 2E1
Yasin/Salona’s ChurchesIn the excavations conducted in the 1940s beneath the altar of St. Peter at the Vatican, for example, it was discovered that the basilica construction did not originally completely bury the mid-second-century aedicula shrine, but instead enveloped it in exquisite marble and left it projecting through the floor of the fourth-century church.{19} This archaeological testimony confirmed the tight relationship between the basilica’s architectural plan and the earlier shrine: every component of the basilica directed the visitor to the apostle’s memoria.
Quote ID: 2776
Time Periods: 3
King James Bible: Instructions to the Translators, The
Keith Mason, Managing Editor, Mason Soft Technology, Ltd
Book ID: 590 Page: 1
Section: 2E1
INSTRUCTIONS TO THE TRANSLATORS1. The ordinary Bible read in the Church, commonly called the Bishops’ Bible, to be followed, and as little altered as the original will permit.
2. The names of the prophets and the holy writers, with the other names in the text, to be
retained, as near as may be, accordingly as they are vulgarly used.
3. The old ecclesiastical words to be kept, as the word church, not to be translated congregation.
4. When any word hath divers significations, that to be kept which hath been most commonly used by the most eminent fathers, being agreeable to the propriety of the place and the analogies of faith.
5. The division of chapters to be altered either not at all, or as little as may be, if necessity so require.
6. No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek words, which cannot, without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be expressed, in the text.
7. Such quotations of places to be marginally set down as shall serve for the fit reference of one Scripture to another.
8. Every particular man of each company to take the same chapter or chapters; and, having translated or amended them severally by himself where he thinks good, all to meet together to confirm what they have done, and agree for their part what shall stand.
9. As any one company hath dispatched any one book in this manner, they shall send it to the rest, to be considered of seriously and judiciously; for his Majesty is very careful on this point.
10. If any company, upon the review of the book so sent, shall doubt or differ upon any places, to send them word thereof, to note the places, and therewithal to send their reasons; to which if they consent not, the difference to be compounded at the general meeting, which is to be of the chief persons of each company, at the end of the work.
11. When any place of special obscurity is doubted of, letters to be directed by authority to send to any learned man in the land for his judgment of such a place.
12. Letters to be sent from every bishop to the rest of his clergy, admonishing them of this translation in hand, and to move and charge as many as, being skillful in the tongues, have taken pains in that kind, to send their particular observations to the company, either at Westminster, Cambridge, or Oxford, according as it was directed before in the king’s letter to the archbishop.
13. The directors in each company to be the Deans of Westminster and Chester, for Westminster, and the king’s professors in Hebrew and Greek in the two universities.
14. These translations to be used, when they agree better with the text than the Bishops’ Bible: Tyndale’s, Coverdale’s, Matthew’s [Rogers’], Whitchurch’s [Cranmer’s], Geneva.”
15. By a later rule, “three or four of the most ancient and grave divines, in either of the universities, not employed in translating, to be assigned to be overseers of the translation, for the better observation of the fourth rule.”
Quote ID: 9319
Time Periods: 7
Landscape with Two Saints: How Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe
Lisa M. Bitel
Book ID: 125 Page: 196
Section: 2E1
The monks of Saint-Denis should have been more sympathetic, for Genovefa had once authenticated their own patron’s remains. What is more, they would suffer an identical crisis two and a half centuries later. In 1410 the canons of Notre Dame challenged the community of Saint-Denis before the Parlement of Paris to prove that they kept the genuine head of Denis. The canons from the island claimed to have it in their own treasury.
Quote ID: 2863
Time Periods: ?
Landscape with Two Saints: How Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe
Lisa M. Bitel
Book ID: 125 Page: 215
Section: 2E1
In 1248, when King (and later saint) Louis brought the Crown of Thorns from Saint-Denis to Sainte-Chapelle and summoned the saints of Paris to the dedication of his glorious new church, neither Genovefa nor Marcel attended.
Quote ID: 2865
Time Periods: ?
Last Pagans of Rome, The
Alan Cameron
Book ID: 241 Page: 162
Section: 2E1
Prudentius had no idea who the flamines were or what they did (or used to do). He did not even know the best-attested thing about them, that they wore a special spiked cap (galerus or apex). {130}
Quote ID: 6052
Time Periods: ?
Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World
Ed. G.W. Bowerrsock, Peter Brown, Oleg Grabar
Book ID: 126 Page: 7
Section: 2A1,2E1,3C
The powerful but apocryphal idea of the finding of the True Cross by Constantine’s mother Helena gave rise to a tangle of further stories, among them the entirely legendary tale of the baptism of Constantine by Sylvester, the bishop of Rome.
Quote ID: 2871
Time Periods: 4
Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World
Ed. G.W. Bowerrsock, Peter Brown, Oleg Grabar
Book ID: 126 Page: 170
Section: 2E1,3C
On 11 May 330, Rome ceased to be the most important place in the Roman empire. Five hundred miles east of the Eternal City, on a site occupied by modern Istanbul, a new imperial capital was dedicated and (like Rome before it) named after its founder: Constantinople, the city of Emperor Constantine. The inauguration ceremonies were magnificent. On the first of forty days of celebrations, parades, and largesse, the imperial court assembled at the foot of a tall porphyry column erected in the center of the city’s new forum…
was crowned by a radiate diadem like the rising sun; each of its seven glittering rays contained a sliver from the nails used to crucify Christ. Inside the statue, as further guarantee of the city’s security, was hidden a splinter from the True Cross.
…
This stunning ritual was repeated each year on Constantine’s orders to mark the anniversary of the city’s dedication. For the next two years hundred years, as the golden image rounded the turning post of the Hippodrome and neared the imperial box, Roman emperors and their courtiers prostrated themselves before Constantinople’s glittering founder.
Quote ID: 2885
Time Periods: 4
Later Roman Empire, The
Averil Cameron
Book ID: 243 Page: 162
Section: 2E1
Crosses in the form of crucifixes were not popular until well after the late fourth century.
Quote ID: 6164
Time Periods: ?
Later Roman Empire, The
Averil Cameron
Book ID: 243 Page: 163
Section: 2E1,4B
“Official diptychs sponsored by Xns, such as the diptych of Probus (406), simply add Xn symbols such as the chi-rho to the standard representation of late Roman dignitaries.”
Quote ID: 6165
Time Periods: 5
Later Roman Empire, The
Averil Cameron
Book ID: 243 Page: 62b
Section: 2E1,3C
Later Christian myth has it that C’s mother Helena found the “True Cross” during the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
Quote ID: 6124
Time Periods: 4
Lollards of the Chiltern Hills: Glimpses of English Dissent in the Middle Ages, The
W. H. Summers
Book ID: 248 Page: 7/8
Section: 2E1
Later tradition asserted that on this occasion he healed an afflicted girl with a piece of gold which had been touched by the Holy Lance (the spear which had pierced the Savior’s side); but unfortunately this was before the Holy Lance had been found at Antioch.page 17 in new book
Quote ID: 6225
Time Periods: 7
Lollards of the Chiltern Hills: Glimpses of English Dissent in the Middle Ages, The
W. H. Summers
Book ID: 248 Page: 12
Section: 2E1
It became the most renowned place of pilgrimage in the county, for its founder presented it with a portion of the contents of a golden vessel, said to contain some of the blood of our Saviour, which he had obtained in Germany...page 27 in new book
Quote ID: 6227
Time Periods: 7
Lollards of the Chiltern Hills: Glimpses of English Dissent in the Middle Ages, The
W. H. Summers
Book ID: 248 Page: 30/31
Section: 2E1
In 1401, the Court Rolls of the manor of Wycombe contain the entry, “Item, they present that John Dryvere doth not set up a cross upon his house.”The Lollards, we are told, held that “all they who do worship and reverence the sign of the cross do commit idolatry;” and whether Dryvere was a Lollard or not, it seems likely that the authorities wished to show their zeal for orthodoxy by calling attention to his omission.
page 65-66 of new book
Quote ID: 6236
Time Periods: ?
Lollards of the Chiltern Hills: Glimpses of English Dissent in the Middle Ages, The
W. H. Summers
Book ID: 248 Page: 62
Section: 2E1,3A2A
"Christopher Shoemaker . . . met with a fiery death. . . . He was charged with having read to Joan Say . . . ’out of a little book, the words which Christ spake to his disciples,’ and with having spoken against pilgrimages, image worship, and transubstantiation." page 133-134 of new book [new note!]PJ Note: Foxe, iv. 217.
"Andrew Randal of Kickmansworth (iv. 226). In February, 1518, he was apprehended and brought before Dr. Hed, Chancellor of the diocese of London. It was asserted that he again recanted; but this seems doubtful. On March 29th he was delivered to the secular power, with the usual hypocritical request that he might not be put to death; but before noon of the next day, he was committed to the flames in Smithfield."
page 135 of new book
Quote ID: 6240
Time Periods: 7
Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church
A Study of a Conflict from the Maccabees to Donatus By W.H.C. Frend
Book ID: 316 Page: 9
Section: 2E1
The intense fury of the people and their fear that somehow or other the Christians might triumph over their gods, stands out on every page of the confessor’s story. Not even the death of the Christians was sufficient. At all costs their claim to immortality must be shown to be vain. This is clearly expressed in a statement put into the mouth of pagans to justify the treatment of the bodies of the victims, ‘As they said, “that they might not even have any hope of resurrection”,’ through their religion. {75}
Quote ID: 3177
Time Periods: ?
Mary Through the Centuries
Jaroslav Pelikan
Book ID: 148 Page: 78
Section: 2E1
The title “Black Madonna” acquired special significance when it came to be applied to the celebrated icon of Mary at Jasna Góra in the Polish city of Częstochowa, attributed to Saint Luke the icon painter, which is the most revered sacred image in Central Europe and the object of countless pilgrimages (see p. viii, above).
Quote ID: 3213
Time Periods: ?
Medieval Saints: A Reader
Edited by Mary-Ann Stouck
Book ID: 151 Page: 370
Section: 2E1
Against them we must reply that if they wish to adore all wood fashioned in the shape of a cross because Christ hung on a cross, then it is fitting for them to adore many other things which Christ did in the flesh. He hung on the cross scarcely six hours, but he was in the Virgin’s womb nine lunar months and more than eleven days, a total of two hundred and seventy-six solar days, that is, nine months and more than six days. Let virgin girls therefore be adored, because a Virgin gave birth to Christ. Let mangers be adored, because as soon as he was born he was laid in a manger. Let old rags be adored, because immediately after he was born he was wrapped in old rags. Let boats be adored, because he often sailed in boats, taught the throngs from a small boat, slept in a boat, from a boat commanded the winds, and to the right of a fishing boat ordered them to cast the net when that great prophetic draught of fish was made. Let asses be adored, because he came to Jerusalem sitting on an ass. Let lambs be adored, because it was written of him, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” (But those infamous devotees of perverse doctrines prefer to eat the living lambs and adore only the ones painted on the wall!)Still further, let lions be adored, because it was written of him, “The Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered.” Let stones be adored, because when he was taken down from the Cross he was placed in a rock-hewn sepulcher, and because the apostle says of him, “The Rock was Christ.”
Quote ID: 3253
Time Periods: ?
Minucius Felix, Octavius, LCL 250: Tertullian, Minucius Felix
Minucius Felix
Book ID: 332 Page: 406
Section: 2E1
{a} This unqualified repudiation of reverence for the Cross goes further than Tert. Apol. 16 which also dwells on these fanciful analogies.
Quote ID: 8102
Time Periods: ?
Minucius Felix, Octavius, LCL 250: Tertullian, Minucius Felix
Minucius Felix
Book ID: 332 Page: 407
Section: 2E1
“Crosses again we neither worship nor set our hopes on.{a}
Quote ID: 8103
Time Periods: ?
Monumenta Bulgarica
Thomas Butler
Book ID: 154 Page: 17/19
Section: 2E1
“Let us proceed around the casket, therefore, as around the Ark of the Covenant – not carrying in it today what Moses carried in the Ark, but an apostle…”….
And after he kissed the blessed casket,….
Quote ID: 3282
Time Periods: ?
Monumenta Bulgarica
Thomas Butler
Book ID: 154 Page: 161
Section: 2D3B,2E1,2A3
But they [PJ: Bogomils] are worse than devils. Devils fear Christ’s cross, but the heretics cut them up and make tools from them. Devils fear the image of Christ painted on a wooden panel, but the heretics do not bow to icons, calling them idols. Devils fear the relics of God’s righteous /saints/ , not daring to approach the caskets in which lie the priceless treasure, given to Christians for their deliverance from all sorts of misfortune. But the heretics jeer at them, and they make fun of us when they see us bowing to them…
Quote ID: 3284
Time Periods: 7
Monumenta Bulgarica
Thomas Butler
Book ID: 154 Page: 163
Section: 2D3B,2E1
In error they say about the cross: “Why should we bow to it? Because the Jews crucified God’s Son on it, the cross is more hateful to God.” Thus they teach their people to hate it and not bow to it, saying: “If someone killed the tsar’s son with the tree, can it be dear to the tsar? It’s the same with the cross and God.”
Quote ID: 3285
Time Periods: ?
Monumenta Bulgarica
Thomas Butler
Book ID: 154 Page: 209
Section: 2E1,2D3B
Art. 51. To those [Bogomils] who reject the veneration of the holy and life-giving cross, and the holy and sacred icons, anathema!
Quote ID: 3291
Time Periods: 7
Pagan Christianity: The Origins of Our Modern Church Practices
Frank Viola
Book ID: 168 Page: 102
Section: 2E1,2E3
When Christianity was born, it was the only religion on earth that had no sacred objects, no sacred persons, and no sacred spaces. {28} Although surrounded by Jewish synagogues and pagan temples, the early Christians were the only religious people on earth that did not erect sacred buildings for their worship. {29} The Christian faith was born in homes, out in courtyards, along roadsides, and in living rooms. {30}
Quote ID: 3548
Time Periods: 123
Pagan Christianity: The Origins of Our Modern Church Practices
Frank Viola
Book ID: 168 Page: 109/110
Section: 2E1,2A3
Constantine also strengthened the pagan notion of the sacredness of objects and places. {86} Largely due to his influence, relic-mongering became common in the church. {87} By the fourth century, obsession with relics got so bad that some Christian leaders spoke out against it saying, “A heathen observance introduced in the churches under the cloak of religion . . . the work of idolaters.”{88}
Quote ID: 3558
Time Periods: 4
Pagan Christianity: The Origins of Our Modern Church Practices
Frank Viola
Book ID: 168 Page: 110/111
Section: 2E1,2A3
At this point, a word should be said about Constantine’s mother, Helena. This woman was most noted for her obsession with relics. In A.D. 326, Helena made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. {93} In A.D. 327 in Jerusalem, she reportedly found the cross and nails that were used to crucify Jesus. {94} It is reported that Constantine promoted the idea that the bits of wood that came from Christ’s cross possessed spiritual powers! {95}
Quote ID: 3560
Time Periods: 4
Pagan Christianity: The Origins of Our Modern Church Practices
Frank Viola
Book ID: 168 Page: 116
Section: 2A4,2E1,3C
Under Constantine’s reign, the clergy, who had first worn everyday clothes, began dressing in special garments. What were those special clothes? They were the garments of Roman officials. Further, various gestures of respect toward the clergy were introduced in the church that were comparable to the gestures that were used to honor Roman Officials. {136}
The Roman custom of beginning a service with processional music was adopted as well. For this purpose, choirs were developed and brought into the Christian church. {137} Worship became more professional, dramatic, and ceremonial.
Quote ID: 3568
Time Periods: ?
Pagan Rome and the Early Christians
Stephen Benko
Book ID: 169 Page: 54
Section: 2E1
Minucius Felix cast his dialogue in the form of a personal reminiscence. Octavius comes to Rome for a visit, and he goes with Minucius and Caecilius to Ostia for a stroll along the seashore. Along the way they come across a statue of the god Serapis. Immediately Caecilius kisses his hand and places it on the statue, a widespread custom of the time. Although an enlightened pagan would never identify a statue with the god whom it depicted, he would respect the statue as a representation of that god and very likely would kiss it. Some statues were worn smooth by much kissing, just as one foot of the statue of St. Peter in Rome is worn smooth because of the caressing and kissing over many centuries by pious visitors and pilgrims.
Quote ID: 3652
Time Periods: ?
Paganism and Christianity 100-425 C.E. a Sourcebook
Ramsay MacMullen and Eugene N. Lane
Book ID: 170 Page: 6
Section: 2E1
For Josephus, this was the third element in his instruction; the power of sorcery had failed where Christ’s name and the sign of the cross are. Nevertheless he was not persuaded to become a Christian.
Quote ID: 3675
Time Periods: ?
Paganism in the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 171 Page: 59
Section: 2E1
Aside from rare and rarefied speculation on sympathetic magic, inhabitants of the Apologists’ world thought first to touch the gods through images, because that was where the gods lived; or at least, to images they could be brought by entreaty, there to listen and to act. Whether or not they fitted exactly, whether they looked like their portraits in stone or wood, they were to be found inside. Christian observers, who had no reason not to be accurate, report this as the generally prevailing idea.{42}
Quote ID: 3717
Time Periods: ?
Paganism in the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 171 Page: 125
Section: 2E1
Altars had cut-out crescents with glass in front, to be lit from behind by lamps or candles; or they had cut-out halos or sun rays over a deity’s head, or whole figures of deities cut out – in short elaborate provisions for unexpected lighting effects, the more certain to impress because of the ordinary darkness of the windowless surroundings.{37}Pastor John notes: John’s Notes: halo
Quote ID: 3766
Time Periods: ?
Paganism in the Roman Empire
Ramsay MacMullen
Book ID: 171 Page: 133
Section: 2E1
What could be more genuine, what could better testify to the confidence of pagans even under a Christian emperor, than the celebrations at Emona when Theodocius visited the city? There went out to meet him “senators notable in their snow-white dress, the flamens venerable in city-purple, the priests standing out because of their peaked hats.”{7} It was officially a pagan reception.
Quote ID: 3775
Time Periods: ?
Painting the Word
John Drury
Book ID: 174 Page: 4
Section: 2E1
Lost and buried at that time to the world of human beings, it was preserved under the protection of God until she unearthed it, later on, in the Holy Land. Christ’s cross
Quote ID: 3878
Time Periods: 7
Paradiso, The
John Ciardi
Book ID: 260 Page: 72
Section: 2E1
Canto VI: MERCURYthat you may see with how much right men go
against the sacred standard when they plot
its subornation or its overthrow. 33
Pastor John notes: John’s note: Rome’s eagle
You know what heroes bled to consecrate
its holy destiny from that first hour
when Pallas died to give it its first state. 36
Quote ID: 6525
Time Periods: ?
Paradiso, The
John Ciardi
Book ID: 260 Page: 75
Section: 2E1
Canto VI: THE SEEKERS OF HONOR JUSTINIANMany a father’s sinfulness has sealed
his children’s doom: let him not think his lilies
will take the place of God’s bird on his shield. 111
Pastor John notes: John’s note: Roman Eagle
Quote ID: 6526
Time Periods: ?
Paradiso, The
John Ciardi
Book ID: 260 Page: 219
Section: 2E1
Canto XIX: THE JUST RULERS BAD KINGS DENOUNCEDThose blazing glories of the Holy Ghost
stopped, still formed in the sign that spread the honor
of Rome across the world, to its last coast, 102
Pastor John notes: John’s note: the Roman eagle
Quote ID: 6530
Time Periods: ?
Rome 1300: On The Path of the Pilgrim
Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias
Book ID: 189 Page: 21
Section: 2E1,3A1
Though disparate in subject, scale, and material, everything in this odd array shares two features: all of the objects refer in one way or another to the imperial might of ancient Rome, and none has ever been buried. Reasons to preserve and display these prizes from Rome’s patrimony have always been found.One group bears on the meting out of justice, a papal responsibility, that often takes place outside the Patriarchium. Signs of this function are difficult to overlook – a thief’s severed hand is tacked up on a wall, and an executed murderer’s charred corpse is visible in a corner of the square. The bronze she-wolf (fig. 14) set in the portico is emblematic of the pope’s juridical authority. In ancient times, the sculpture was revered as representing Lupa, who nurtured the legendary founders of Rome, the brothers Romulus and Remus.
Quote ID: 4182
Time Periods: ?
Rome 1300: On The Path of the Pilgrim
Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias
Book ID: 189 Page: 22
Section: 2E1
*John’s Note: Use this picture (bronze sculpture of the she-wolf)*
Quote ID: 4183
Time Periods: 0
Rome 1300: On The Path of the Pilgrim
Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias
Book ID: 189 Page: 28
Section: 2E1,3A1
The most explicit emblems of temporal authority are the three papal thrones. Two of these – the second-century imperial thrones made of porphyry that are installed before the chapel of St. Sylvester within the Patriarchium – are not in public view, but a more modest, though still impressive, ancient white marble throne is to be seen in front of the basilica (fig. 24). Used during papal coronations, the inherited seats symbolize the new pontiff’s worldly power.
Quote ID: 4184
Time Periods: 27
Rome 1300: On The Path of the Pilgrim
Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias
Book ID: 189 Page: 33
Section: 2E1,3A1
But the painting modifies one important detail: the papal canopy is rendered as a flat awning supported by two porphyry and two green serpentine marble columns. This form was taken not from the actual cusped structure in which the pope appears but from ancient images of the emperor appearing in public, surrounded by court officials. As such, it is intended to signal Boniface’s earthly sovereignty.
Quote ID: 4185
Time Periods: 17
Rome 1300: On The Path of the Pilgrim
Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias
Book ID: 189 Page: 33
Section: 2E1,3A1
A striped parasol, which is another borrowing from imperial emblems and the ultimate sign of Boniface’s temporal authority.
Quote ID: 4186
Time Periods: 17
Rome 1300: On The Path of the Pilgrim
Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias
Book ID: 189 Page: 39
Section: 2E1,2A3
The idea of constructing a Holy of Holies at the Lateran was particularly appropriate because the Lateran church of St. John had long been compared to Sinai, where Moses received the laws, or despairingly, to the synagogue. This comparison originated in part because the basilica’s altar enshrined not only relics of Christ and the two saints John but also the Temple implements captured by Vespasian and Titus in 70 C.E.: Aaron’s rod, the seven-branched candlestick, the altar of incense, the jar of manna, and the shew-bread table.
Quote ID: 4187
Time Periods: 7
Rome 1300: On The Path of the Pilgrim
Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias
Book ID: 189 Page: 40/41
Section: 2E1
The inscription lists a fragment of the True Cross, Christ’s umbilicus and foreskin as well as his sandals, Mary’s hair, some of her milk, and her veil. (Because both Christ and his mother had ascended bodily into heaven, they left only dispensable remains behind). There is also a bit of the bread from the Last Supper, John the Baptist’s coat, St. Matthew’s shoulder, and Bartholomew’s chin. And most impressive, the Sancta Sanctorum preserves the heads of SS. Peter, Paul, Agnes, and Euphemia.
Quote ID: 4188
Time Periods: ?
Rome 1300: On The Path of the Pilgrim
Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias
Book ID: 189 Page: 65
Section: 2E1,3A1
It is a solemn moment when the Acheropita, the Christ icon residing in the Sancta Santorum, is carried into the campus Lateranensis to the throng of pilgrims waiting there. Borne before Lupa, the great bronze equestrian, and the other trophies of the ancient empire assembled at the papal palace, the Acheropita vividly reminds the faithful that Christ is now ruler of Rome and that his vicar, the pope, governs a capital city made sacred by the Savior’s presence.
Quote ID: 4192
Time Periods: 017
Rome 1300: On The Path of the Pilgrim
Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias
Book ID: 189 Page: 82
Section: 2E1
The second and third lines refer to three relics preserved within the body of Christ depicted above in the mosaic itself, a piece of the True Cross and teeth of St. James the Apostle and St. Ignatius: “The remains of the Cross of wood and of James and Ignatius/rest above this inscription in the body of Christ.”
Quote ID: 4193
Time Periods: 7
Rome 1300: On The Path of the Pilgrim
Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias
Book ID: 189 Page: 126
Section: 2E1
The great basilica is called by various names: Liveriana, for its original papal patron, Pope Liverius (352-66); Sancta Maria ad Praesepem, for its most cherished relic, the crib (presepio) in which the newborn Christ Child had lain; and Sancta Maria Maior (Sta. Maria Maggiore) for its place in the ecclesiastic hierarchy of Rome.
Quote ID: 4196
Time Periods: 567
Rome 1300: On The Path of the Pilgrim
Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias
Book ID: 189 Page: 138
Section: 2E1
Today awaiting the arrival of her son in the form of the Acheropita, the Regina caeli sheds its allegorical and historical meanings; the image is the Virgin herself and, as such, the Church of Rome.
Quote ID: 4199
Time Periods: ?
Rome 1300: On The Path of the Pilgrim
Herbert L. Kessler and Johanna Zacharias
Book ID: 189 Page: 178
Section: 2E1
Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls, apse, detail. The section of the mosaic depicting the two donors flanking the “holy innocents” is also largely original. Relics of the children massacred in Pilate’s hunt for Christ were preserved directly beneath the aspe;
Quote ID: 4200
Time Periods: 7
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 89
Section: 2E1,4B
The dioceses and the monasteries to the north of Rome, Nepi, and St. Andrew on Monte Soratte, ascribed to her [Galla’s] endowment from her vast family estates the foundation of many of the churches around Ponzano, on both sides of the Tiber Valley in the Sabine Hills, and on the Tregia.Galla’s example was followed, as we have seen, by other leading members of Roman families. Gregory’s decision to abandon his civil career and embrace the religious life was not unusual, therefore: his family estates, in Sicily and around Tivoli, were handed over to the Roman Church, and with a few companions he retired to the monastery he founded in his parent’s house on the Coelian.
Quote ID: 4296
Time Periods: 456
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 109
Section: 2E1
Their corporate nature was emphasized by their distinctive privileges. Chief among these was the use of the mappula, a white, fringed saddlecloth, the campagi, flat, black slippers, and the udones, white stockings, all inherited from the imperial senate. These distinctions were jealously guarded; in 593 the clergy of Ravenna claimed the privilege of the mappula for themselves and Gregory the Great, hesitating at first to allow it, finally conceded its use only to the senior deacons of that see.
Quote ID: 4321
Time Periods: 6
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 114
Section: 2E1,4B
Here pride in a formal Latin was longest preserved. The deacon John, a leader of the ninth century resurgence of Roman pride and antiquarianism, exaggerated when he wrote in his Life of Gregory I that in the Lateran (the ’palace of Latium’ in his play on words) everyone spoke good Latin and wore the toga, but a fresco of the most articulate and stylistically flexible of the Latin Fathers. . . .
Quote ID: 4327
Time Periods: 7
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 124
Section: 2E1,3A1
Other expressions of the papacy’s sovereignty in the West were adopted in the latter part of the seventh century: the use of the phrygium or camelaucon, a tall white head-dress from which the tiara was to develop and which, in legend, had been accepted by Sylvester from Constantine I in lieu of a temporal crown which would obscure his clerical tonsure; the laudes, the acclamations from the people, adopted from the court ceremonial of appointment; and the service of the suburbicarian bishops in the Lateran.
Quote ID: 4329
Time Periods: 7
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 129
Section: 2E1,2E6
The synod of 721, for example, besides condemning Hadrian, son of Exhiliratus, who had eloped with the deaconess Epiphania, laid down that the clergy were not to go out of doors without wearing the opitergum, a great all-enveloping mantle; while the distinctive mark of clerical status was not to be abandoned in the dictates of fashion: ’If any cleric allows his hair to grow, let him be condemned.’
Quote ID: 4330
Time Periods: 7
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 145
Section: 2E1
The Avars had broken through the Danube frontier, and in the East the Persian King Khosroes overran Syria in 611; Damascus was captured two years later, and Jerusalem followed in May 614 when, to the horror of Christendom, the True Cross preserved there was removed in triumph to Ctesiphon.
Quote ID: 4342
Time Periods: ?
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 166
Section: 2E1
[c. 700] The Iconoclast movement, which lasted for more than a century from Leo’s first decree in 727, split the Empire; rebellion accompanied the first decrees in the island province of the Aegean and in Italy.
Quote ID: 4347
Time Periods: 7
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 176
Section: 2E1
A later pope was to send them miracle-working gold keys to Peter’s tomb area to a Frankish king in appeal for the liberation of Rome from the Lombards. Other relics, too, were sought, above all filings from the chains worn by St. Peter in prison. . . .
Quote ID: 4355
Time Periods: 7
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 184/185
Section: 2E1
The monk Radoin, sent in 826 by Abbot Hilduin of Soissons in search of relics, ran directly into a political controversy.To them Radoin presented his letters and made his request - for no less than the body of St. Sebastian. The two ministers paled; they told Radoin that St. Sebastian was, after St. Peter and St. Paul, the third patron of Rome, that he had been named by Pope Gaius as defensor of the Roman Church and that the transfer was therefore impossible.
Quote ID: 4360
Time Periods: 7
Shape of the Liturgy, The
Dom Gregory Dix
Book ID: 272 Page: 398
Section: 2E1
What one may call ‘official costume for public acts’ both in the case of magistrates and priests had been common in classical Greece and usual all over the Near East for many centuries before the christian era.
Quote ID: 6844
Time Periods: ?
Shape of the Liturgy, The
Dom Gregory Dix
Book ID: 272 Page: 399
Section: 2E1,3C
It is therefore not surprising to find that the earliest mention of a special liturgical garment for use at christian worship comes from the Near East, and specifically from Jerusalem. We learn incidentally from Theodoret that c. a.d. 330 Constantine had presented to his new cathedral church at Jerusalem as part of its furnishing a ‘sacred robe’ (hieran stolēn) of gold tissue to be worn by the bishop when presiding at the solemn baptisms of the paschal vigil. {1}
Quote ID: 6845
Time Periods: 4
Shape of the Liturgy, The
Dom Gregory Dix
Book ID: 272 Page: 400
Section: 2E1
These are in essentials the pontificals of a mediaeval bishop. But Cyprian is wearing them simply as the ordinary lay gentlemen’s dress of the day.
Quote ID: 6846
Time Periods: ?
Shape of the Liturgy, The
Dom Gregory Dix
Book ID: 272 Page: 402
Section: 2E1
The Maniple. Just as the pallium and stole derive from the secular ‘scarf of office’, so the vestment known as the maniple (fanon, sudarium) derives directly from the mappula, a sort of large handkerchief which formed part of the ceremonial dress of consuls and other magistrates, carried in the hand or laid across the arm.
Quote ID: 6847
Time Periods: 4567
Shape of the Liturgy, The
Dom Gregory Dix
Book ID: 272 Page: 403
Section: 2E1
The Camelaucum or Tiara. It is the same story with other vestments that originated before the middle ages. The Papal tiara, for instance, is derived from the camelaucum or phrygia, a ‘cap of state’ worn by the emperors and very high officials in the fourth century. The statue of Constantine on his triumphal arch at Rome is wearing one. A version of the same headgear was worn by the doge of Venice and other Italo-Greek potentates.
Quote ID: 6848
Time Periods: 4567
Shape of the Liturgy, The
Dom Gregory Dix
Book ID: 272 Page: 403
Section: 2E1
The Campagi or Shoes. The special liturgical shoes and stockings of Western bishops also originated as a secular ornament, worn outside church as well as at the liturgy. As far back as the early days of the Roman republic consuls and triumphing generals were distinguished by high-laced shoes of a particular form and a bright red colour; and patricians were distinguished from plebeians by a particular form of black shoe.
Quote ID: 6849
Time Periods: ?
Shape of the Liturgy, The
Dom Gregory Dix
Book ID: 272 Page: 404
Section: 2E1
These are the only ecclesiastical vestments worn in christendom before c. a.d. 800. {2} In their adoption there is evidence of a definite policy pursued everywhere during the fourth and fifth centuries, viz., that the liturgy should be celebrated always in the garments of everyday life.----
What turned this clothing into a special liturgical vesture was mere conservatism. When the dress of the layman finally changed in the sixth and seventh centuries to the new barbarian fashions, the clergy as the last representatives of the old civilised tradition retained the old civilised costume.
Quote ID: 6850
Time Periods: ?
Shape of the Liturgy, The
Dom Gregory Dix
Book ID: 272 Page: 405
Section: 2E1
The case is, however, quite different with the vestments which developed later, the Mitre, Cope and Gloves, and the choir dress of Surplice, etc. These mediaeval vestments were of deliberate clerical invention, and were meant in their ecclesiastical form to be worn only at the liturgy, and as clerical marks of distinction from the remainder of the worshippers.
Quote ID: 6851
Time Periods: ?
Shape of the Liturgy, The
Dom Gregory Dix
Book ID: 272 Page: 409
Section: 4B,2E1
This review of the history of vestments, though sketchy, is sufficient to establish two main points:I. That in the fourth century, as before, the ‘domestic’ character of early christian worship asserted itself even after the transference of the eucharist to the basilicas sufficiently to prevent the adoption anywhere of special ceremonial robes, such as were a usual part of the apparatus of the pagan mysteries.
Quote ID: 6852
Time Periods: 4567
Shape of the Liturgy, The
Dom Gregory Dix
Book ID: 272 Page: 421
Section: 2A3,2E1
Lights as Votive Offerings. The burning of votive candles as well as other lights (and incense) at the tombs of ‘heroes’ and before the statues of the gods was a general practice in mediterranean paganism, and was not unknown in pre-christian judaism at ‘the tombs of the prophets’. The introduction of this form of popular devotion at the tombs of christian martyrs even before the end of the pre-Nicene period seems to be witnessed to by a canon (34) of the Spanish Council of Elvira c. a.d. 300 forbidding it (though this interpretation of the canon is not quite certain). The council’s prohibition certainly did not end the practice, even in Spain.
Quote ID: 6855
Time Periods: 234
Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/402506.htm
Book ID: 306 Page: 1
Section: 2E1
Reply to Objection 2. We worship that insensible body, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the soul, which was once united thereto, and now enjoys God; and for God’s sake, whose ministers the saints were.
Quote ID: 7540
Time Periods: ?
Tertullian, Apology and De Spectaculis, LCL 250
Translated by T.R. Glover
Book ID: 134 Page: 83
Section: 2E1
chapter XVI
Yes, and the man who thinks we worship the cross, will prove a fellow-worshipper of ours. For when a bit of wood is worshipped – what matters the shape, if the nature of the material is the same?
Quote ID: 2953
Time Periods: ?
Tertullian, Apology and De Spectaculis, LCL 250
Translated by T.R. Glover
Book ID: 134 Page: 267
Section: 2E1
We know neither sort of altar; we adore neither sort of image; we pay no sacrifice; we pay no funeral rite. No, and we do not eat of what is offered in sacrificial or funeral rite, because “we cannot eat of the Lord’s supper and the supper of demons.” {d}
Quote ID: 8079
Time Periods: ?
The Theodosian Code and Novels and Sirmondian Constitutions, bk. xvi
Translated by Clyde Pharr
Book ID: 710 Page: ?
Section: 2E1
Chapter 1: Origin Of The Worship Of Relics And Images In The Christian ChurchHero-worship is innate to human nature, and it is founded on some of our noblest feelings,―gratitude, love, and admiration,―but which, like all other feelings, when uncontrolled by principle and reason, may easily degenerate into the wildest exaggerations, and lead to most dangerous consequences. It was by such an exaggeration of these noble feelings that Paganism filled the Olympus with gods and demigods,―elevating to this rank men who have often deserved the gratitude of their fellow-creatures, by some signal services rendered to the community, or their admiration, by having performed some deeds which required a more than usual degree of mental and physical powers.
Quote ID: 9890
Time Periods: 047
Vigilantius and His Times
William Stephen Gilly
Book ID: 284 Page: 7/8/9
Section: 2E1
Such were the doubts and reflections of Vigilantius. His scruples led to serious consideration and enquiry. He passed several years in travelling for the purpose of conferring with the pious and wise of different countries. He expended vast sums of money in the translation and circulation of Scripture. He visited churches, where resistance was made to the corruptions that prevailed in Rome and in the East. He “searched the Scriptures daily, whether those things were so.”. . . .
For this, he was denounced by some of his contemporaries, as an heretic; although he was never known to deny any of the vital truths of the Gospel, or to oppose himself to the apostolical discipline of the Church:
. . . .
He was raised from an humble station, and was introduced to the society of the learned and the good by Sulpicius Severus, and Paulinus of Nola, two of the very best men of the age, whose affection and friendship he never lost. In the first passage, where we find mention made of him by his opponent Jerome, he is called ‘The holy presbyter Vigilantius;’ and yet, when he undertook to protest against practices, which he regarded as superstitious and unscriptural, Jerome assailed him with every expression of contumely and rancour. {*} ‘Base-born tapster,’ ‘Madman,’ ‘Brute,’ Monster,’ ‘Possessed of an unclean spirit,’ these are specimens of the style in which the recluse of Bethlehem inveighed against the witness of Aquitain.
Pg, 127 -2E1- The father of Vigilantius was an inn-keeper, descended from one of those robbers, whom Pompey chased out of Spain. Jerome sneers at this ignoble parentage, and makes the pedigree and birth-place of Vigilantius the subject of his coarse jokes.
. . . .
And as to being born in an humble inn, there is one event, which might have induced a Christian writer to refrain from any expression of contempt on that score.
Quote ID: 7198
Time Periods: ?
Vigilantius and His Times
William Stephen Gilly
Book ID: 284 Page: 222/223
Section: 2D3B,2E1
Holy writ declares that the use of false helps in religious services leads to all manner of abominations, that it is a snare, a temptation, and a stumbling-block, that it is the beginning of “fornication against God,” and that it ends in the deceived and deluded transgressors being delivered over to the severest judgments. “The Lord shall smite thee with madness and blindness, and astonishment of heart.” (Deut. xxviii. 28.) Vigilantius saw the literal fulfillment of this curse in the persons of Sulpicius and Paulinus; they both outlived the strength of their faculties and dwindled down to imbeciles; and the church, with the ecclesiastical system to which they belonged, has ended in forcing its members to worship the images, which at first it only commended to notice, as instructive objects, as memorials, and helps to devotion. At first the Latin Church only said to the dumb stone, ‘It shall teach;’ but now its language is, ‘I most firmly assert that the images of Christ, and of the mother of God ever virgin, and also of the other saints, are to be had and retained, and that due honour and veneration are to be given to them.’ {*}We may talk of the authority and the antiquity of the Fathers, but if authority is to be respected, what authority should weigh heavier with us than that of the apostolical age itself?
[Footnote *] Creed of Pope Pius IV.
2E1
PJ note: Pope Pius IV (31 March 1499 – 9 December 1565), born Giovanni Angelo Medici, was Pope from 25 December 1559 to his death in 1565.
Quote ID: 7221
Time Periods: 34
Vigilantius and His Times
William Stephen Gilly
Book ID: 284 Page: 224
Section: 1A,2E1
I beg the reader to remember the anecdote related to Epiphanius, who avowed and justified his hasty destruction of a painted curtain hanging before a shrine, because it was ornamented with a picture of Jesus Christ, or of some saint, he cared not which. ‘I tore it down, and I rent it,’ said he, ‘because it presented to view the image of a man in a Church of Christ, contrary to the authority of Scriptures.’In another passage, speaking of the same profane use of pictures, Epiphanius declared, that it was contrary to the Christian religion: ‘contra religionem nostram.’ {ᾠ} The letter, addressed to John of Jerusalem, from which this account is taken, and in which Epiphanius protested that the use of images and pictures (for he expressly calls the picture of a man an image) is contrary to Scripture, and contrary to the Christian religion, was written in the year 396. It was the epistle of one bishop of the Christian Church to another; and yet at this very period, Paulinus was setting up images and pictures in his Church at Nola, and his authority for the practice has ever since been triumphantly appealed to by the Latin Church.
[Footnote *] Hier. Op. IV. 828.
Quote ID: 7222
Time Periods: 4
Western Society And The Church In The Middle Ages
R. W. Southern
Book ID: 286 Page: 94
Section: 2E1
For the western church from the seventh to the eleventh century the existence of the tomb of St. Peter was the most significant fact in Christendom.. . . .
Men thought of him as being there, in Rome. When Ceolfrid, abbot of Jarrow, set out for Rome in 716, he carried a Bible with an inscription dedicating the book, not to the pope, but to the body of St. Peter. {2}
Quote ID: 7304
Time Periods: ?
End of quotes